The Meat Grindr

I hate looking online for sex. It’s so easy and so stupid. You go on your computer to somewhere like gay.com or Adam4adam or even facebook and look for someone to chat with. If you’re me, you find someone and say something totally non-sexual, trying to be funny or nice, like “Hey, cool shoes!” when their picture is just of a naked torso.

Sometimes they chat back and sometimes they don’t. I always go for the older guys, or the Asians, because it seems they never turn me down. There have been times during the last five years that I have literally chatted with guys for five hours straight, without a potty break or a meal and no sex has occurred. This is mostly because I’m afraid to have them come over. What if I look fatter? What if they’re crazy? What if they think my bedding is too feminine? What if they are lying about their STD status? What if they’ve hooked up with my roommate or neighbors? I panic. I close the window. I call my mother.

There is this thing for the iPhone, Grindr, which I was kind of obsessed with for a while. It’s really Satan’s tool against time. It’s a Gay-finder. It GPS’s you and lets you see all of the gay or bi or questioning people who are near you. I initially installed it in Sacramento at a hotel over New Year’s Eve. I literally spoke to no one all night, just staring at this giant gay Hollywood squares board. I deleted it driving home down the five. I reinstalled it a day later.

Over the next six months I would discuss it in therapy, the time I was losing, the guys I was meeting on it—all fatter than the last, never looking like their pictures. I was both impressed and horrified by how much time I spent on it, like all those other web sites NOT having sex, just trying to make a connection with other gay guys. How I used it so unsafely while driving, loading it with glee anytime I was in a different part of town to see new people. I would talk about the mechanical nature of the rare sexual encounters I actually did have, how no one wanted to chat when we’d meet in person, that I felt like a paper tooth-shaped number at the deli counter at Gelson’s blowing this guy or that guy.

I deleted and re-installed Grindr something like 60 times. Each time I deleted it I washed that app right outta my hair, only to reinstall just before bed. And then I’d go back into therapy talking about how the only time anyone would chat with me was late at night, how if I pretended to have left it on by accident overnight, I would wake up delighted by 30 messages. I was amazed when a guy I had hooked up with, who never returned my “hey that was fun” text, would find me six weeks later and ask me how hung I am, as though we’d never met. The fourth time that happened, I was less amazed and more defeated, numb, by how I’d been reduced to being a gay guy looking for validation from sex. It’s weird how technology brought that out of me, fanning the flames of loserdom.

A couple weeks ago, I uploaded a picture from my new spin class on the site hoping to attract local gay people to visit the gym on Mondays at 5:30 (shameless plug). It worked actually, and a few people came, who were all very nice. But the worst part was that the Grindr gods banned me for life for advertising a product other than them. Grindr misses the social network sharing concept that Facebook, Wikipedia, and Mozilla share and thrive on with their users and I guess that’s sad or something—but there is good news: I’ve lost the loser leaves town match with online sex-seeking. And it’s weird, I have hours of free time now. Yesterday, I read the paper and saw a play. Today, I wrote to you all and looked at new places to live. And the connection that I’d been seeking through the keypad on my phone through this useless battery-killer had been there all along. I just had to smile back when walking past a good-looking fellow on the way to the gym, or ask the waiter if he’d like to go see a movie. And this way, they know I look like my picture.